On Fri, Nov 08, 2019 at 10:35:10AM +0100, Patrick Rudolph wrote:
Hi folks, this is an attempt to improve firmware testing by using the infrastructure and knowledge of the kernelci community. If you think this is not the right place, please point me in the right direction.
I'm a coreboot[1] developer trying to make sure that the master branch[2] doesn't regress. Currently there's no public firmware testing, only internal validation suites used by some companies that lack direct and automated feedback before a commit is actually merged. As this isn't a coreboot only topic, but applies to all open source "bios vendors", I added the u-boot project in CC as well.
For me firmware testing looks pretty similar to kernel testing:
- flash firmware to test
- boot a known good linux kernel
- run tests in userspace and verify hardware/software works as expected
On the hardware side we have boards in our lab that allow remote power cycling and firmware flashing. It is attached to self hosted stock LAVA2018. But as we are firmware engineers, we don't want to deal with the administration of servers.
Here are a few questions for you:
- Would it make sense to also cover open source firmware tests on kernelci?
- Do you build the linux images yourself?
- Would you accept firmware images generated by a third party?
- Can anybody get an account for the LAVA server to run firmware test?
- What communication channels do you recommend?
- Will there be meetings or conferences to get in contact with the
community to talk about this?
Over in U-Boot, yes, we have some test suites that we run on real HW as well as QEMU-based hardware. And historically I've talked with Kevin once or twice about testing a current U-Boot on various easy-to-recover boards rather than just what it shipped with, but things never moved past the talking about it stage.